EQUINOX

EQUINOX
       When but to think is to be full of sorrow.
      —Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"
               
All this week I should have known the green tremor
in the air was more than planets aligning
their sights on spring. Lent. You, banished from memory —
your letter breaking vows of silence we took
when ones more sacred were profaned.
So you toss a $1,000 peso Sor Juana coin
to ask if we'd resurrect friendship.
It comes up heads & you give the coin
to a woman who restrings your horoscope.
Did the planets halt their carnivorous circling,
are the days any less profound than those of your birth?
The brotherhood of priests
   didn't like Sor Juana Inez de la Crúz
writing poetry. They said it was a sin against God.
    A calculated risk.
So, in the convent kitchen where God couldn't find her
between passion & reason,
   she practiced a more dangerous art—
spinning dredels in flour to measure the pattern
   of rotation & axis—
hunting the stars at night,
   writing verse by day. Inquisition.
Her body does not survive the suicide of the soul.
Let life be ashamed of lasting so long for me, she cried.
Did I tell you the river rose again encircling each tree,
claiming small vertical kingdoms? After heavy rain,
silence. Then the drains of the world emptied.
La Llorona, Malinche's first mestizo son,
   with odd bits of sky for eyes —
you were born in the alien corn. Huitzilpochtli
has decapitated his sister, the moon & his 400 brothers,
the stars because they didn't want him born.
Do you remember the thrumming insects who threatened
to overtake us in the jungle & what of the small
fish inside me eclipsed by your hand?
I am not yet middle-aged & can't help but think of you,
a traitor, sleeping with someone's young daughter.
Does the bird sing any less shrilly at dawn than at dusk?
I'm still half in love with the idea of easeful death,
so days and nights repeat automatically like bullets
& when Alberto wrote in the sand, I want to cry,
the sea will do it for me,
   he stood there until the waves erased it.
No one told the girls whose papa drowned in Chiapas,
We are made of the ocean, so when we cry
we are giving the sea back her due.
Night's pale vision. The Pleiades are restless.
Orion's belt loosened from the horizon.
In the desert you unroll constellations
favoring star charts & foreign coins
to the celestial bodies themselves.
The lights we see have long since died
& we continue to call them stars.
What tomb are you opening now?
I am not waiting like Lazarus,
for we're better off in unmarked graves
with nothing to resurrect,
save ourselves.

3/20/89
1990 National Writers' Union, Finalist